Imagine you are a successful writer: What’s the worst nightmare you can think of? If you said “being plagiarized,” it’s because you still need to catch up with the 21st century. Jane Friedman, author of books about writing like ‘The Business of Being a Writer’ or ‘How to Publish Your Book,’ woke up one day to discover that six new manuscripts of hers had been published… by an Artificial Intelligence.
Low intelligence, very artificial
It happened on Amazon, when overnight, half a dozen manuscripts signed by Jane Friedman appeared in which she hadn’t touched a single word. Neither she nor anyone else, except for a robot. As she mentioned in her newsletter, she would prefer to see her books pirated than this.
‘A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Good Books, Building an Exciting Author Platform, and Maximizing Success,’ ‘How to Write and Publish an eBook Quickly and Make Money,’ or ‘Great Ideas: Your Guide to Writing a Bestselling eBook on Amazon’ are some of these books. It’s ironic that an artificial intelligence wants to give you guides on writing and publishing bestsellers or, even worse, provide you with good ideas so you don’t run dry.
As she tells it, she could have let them sink without reviews, but that would set a precedent after all: if you can mimic someone else’s writing style, create a book in seconds, and put it up for sale, where does real authorship stand? Seeing that these artificial monsters were being added to her Goodreads page, the author decided to take matters into her own hands and nip it in the bud.
But she’s not alone: there are authors who, in just a week, have 29 new titles that aren’t theirs. Of course, they’re not Stephen King or Danielle Steel, but rather those with a small niche who are trying to take advantage. In the end, they end up spending more time asking Amazon and Goodreads to remove their products than, well, actually working.
We might think that there’s no solution to this plague, let the AI reign over all of us, and shrug in disapproval, but it’s actually much easier than it seems: Amazon and Goodreads just need to create a way to verify authorship to easily block fraudulent books. Since this is an anecdote today and will be a reality tomorrow, they better get their act together… Or announce the ultimate victory of the machines and Skynet. Hey, who knows, maybe Jane Friedman is our Sarah Connor.
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